SYMHC Classics: Ruth Harkness and the First Panda in the U.S.

This 2014 episode covers a 1930s a New York socialite with a dream. She wanted to be the first person to capture a panda from Asia and return to the western world with it. Her quest had a significant impact on the way the Western world viewed wild animals. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Our recent episode on the Western World's introduction
to the o copy had some parallels to our past
episode on socialite Ruth Harkness, who was the first person
to bring a panda into the United States, so it
seemed like a good Saturday classic. This episode originally came
out on June nin so enjoy Welcome to Stuff You

(00:28):
Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
and Welcome to the podcast. I'm calling Fry and I'm
Tracy Wilson. And Uh, this is actually a topic that
I've had on my witch list almost since the beginning
of when Louis came on. I know, I said, I said,

(00:50):
I'd think in the last couple of weeks that I
have been trying to go back to some of those
original ones. I was really excited about marcum In, but
this is one that I really wrestled with because the
material is a little bit emotionally difficult for me, for
like sort of silly, crazy animal lady reasons. It's the
story of one of those odd ambitions that only uh,

(01:11):
the privileged are really afforded. But in the nineteen thirties
and New York socialite had this dream, uh and that
dream was to be the first person to capture a
panda from Asia and returned to the Western world with it.
And it's a u As I said, it's something I
wrestle with a little bit. Um. I've been very open
that I am an animal person and I struggle with
the concept of animals and captivity. Uh. And I'm sure

(01:33):
many of our listeners have similar feelings. I see both
sides of the issue. I volunteered with zoos and aquariums before,
and I really love it. Um. You know, captive animals
in accredited facilities increased public awareness and they provide a
situation where the animals can be studied and they can
bolster conservation efforts. But you know, there's part of me
that has to acknowledge that that is not the natural

(01:55):
state for those animals. So, as I said, I struggle
with it, probably other people do too. And this is
an I kind of touchstone in the development of animals
and captivity in the United States. Uh. And so, for example,
the first time a Westerner even saw a panda, it
was not alive. It was a pelpone display in a
private home, and that was back in eighteen sixty nine.

(02:16):
And once UH Europe and the US kind of got
ahold of this knowledge. It sort of fed into a
time when exploring other lands and kind of a little
bit of a conquering mentality was going on, and particularly
in the realm of animals, there was a lot of
We're discovering new animals all the time. Well, there was
also a strain of orientalism at the time, yes, and

(02:38):
because pandas are native to China, that definitely fed the
fire of it. Uh and it really ended up kicking
off an obsession in the Western world with finding these
black and white bears that seemed so exotic. And in
the early half of the twentieth century, one woman who
we will talk about today, this person I spoke of
at the very beginning, really catapulted the giant panda onto

(02:59):
the world stage and she made the species of media
darling to some degree. So we're going to talk about
Ruth Harkness. So Ruth Maccombs Harkness was not born into money.
She married into it. She actually came from pretty humble origins.
Her father was a carpenter and her mother was a seamstress,
and they made their home in Titusville, Pennsylvania. She was

(03:20):
born on September twenty one, and she had three siblings.
The conservative atmosphere of the home life of the Macombs
was not really something that Ruth was comfortable with. She
had a little bit of edge to her. She knew
there was more in the world that she wanted to discover. Uh.
She became an avid reader as a consequence, and UH.

(03:42):
The entry in her senior yearbook under her picture kind
of is a great encapsulation of what she was like
at this time, and it says, quote, Ruth is rather
hard to get acquainted with, but after you know her,
you find that she has many good qualities and is
a friend worth having. I started the love It sounds
like something Mary Poppins would say about someone who is cult.

(04:02):
I just really really loved that. Ruth tried out college
at the University of Colorado, but she only lasted a
semester before heading to Cuba briefly to work as an
English teacher. But that really did not suit her either.
She had a little bit of wanderlust, uh, and she
was hitting her twenties, of course, just as the jazz
age was kicking off, and so Ruth moved to New
York Allegedly. I think with like twenty five bucks to

(04:24):
her name, and she got a job there as a
dress designer, and she was basically kind of designing uh
outfits that kind of were knockoffs of what was going
on in Paris at the time, and she very quickly
and very fully embraced the decadent aspects of flapper lifestyle.
She really became a quintessential party girl. She was a
heavy drinker, She was a heavy smoker, and she had

(04:46):
this personality though that was really perfectly suited to social
life and kind of becoming a social darling. Her friends
described her as very smart and very witty, and she
had a very commanding presence. She was just sort of
bubbly and outspoken and kind of the perfect It was
a perfect time for a girl like her to really
make her way in the city. During this time, Ruth

(05:08):
met William Harvest Harkness, Jr. And he was wealthy and
had a Harvard education. Bill's father was a high powered attorney,
and the young man was a regular in the society pages.
The two of them were really drawn together and kind
of an opposite attract scenario. Yeah, Bill was much quieter
and more reserved, uh, but he was also really well traveled,

(05:30):
and he spoke many languages, which really appealed to Ruth.
And what really bonded them as a couple is that
they both loved reading, and they would read together in
trade books and discuss the things that they had read
in the books. And they also spent a great deal
of time just pouring over maps and travel journals and
kind of plotting these grand adventures that they really hoped
to take together one day. And this was not like

(05:52):
the fantasy kind of planning of like one day we'll
run away and spend three months in Paris, like they
were really planning some trips. Uh. And they ended up
dating for quite some time before they finally married all
the uh. Some accounts say they basically were living as
married people, like they just didn't make it all official
in paperworky for a while. So, with the financial backing

(06:14):
of his family money, Bill Harkness made an adventurer slash
explorer his occupation, which is awesome work if you can
get it, if you could make it for yourself. Right.
So this was a time when new animals are being
discovered all the time, and men like Bill would race
to be the first to capture and sometimes kill one

(06:34):
of them. Yeah, it was a you know, kind of
that that sense of adventure we've talked about before. It
was what fed a lot of like the Everest expeditions,
but like being the first to do the thing, to
see this animal, to capture this animal. There was a
lot of like a claim that went with that. And
Bill had just had a successful expedition to capture a

(06:55):
komodo dragon, which I would love to do more research
on that trip specifically, because those things are poisonous and
me and not delightful. They do not want hugs. But he,
you know, was sort of chuffed with his success from that,
and he decided that he was going to be the
first man to capture a giant panda. And this was

(07:16):
in ninety four when he kind of mounted this plan,
and so he made a trip to China, but he
got a little blockaded. He ended up spending the next
year there in China just waiting for the proper permit
paperwork to all be approved, because it was not an
easy thing to just stroll in and put your team
together and go. But unfortunately, before his expedition could actually

(07:38):
get underway and all of that paperwork could happen, Bill
became very ill, uh, and he was treated for a while,
but he ended up dying on February eighteenth of nineteen
thirty six in Shanghai, and his illness, which was not
initially accurately diagnosed, turned out to be throat cancer. So
he had basically been withering away while he waited for

(07:58):
these documents. Although his missives back to Ruth, we're all
very peppy and upbeat. So when Bill died, Ruth inherited
his money, and she also inherited the expedition equipment that
he had already assembled in China. So, in a move
that completely shocked all of her socialite friends Ruth, Ruth
decided that instead of settling into life as a wealthy widow,

(08:22):
she would travel to China and pick up where Bill
left off. Yeah, this was really, uh a wild move.
I mean she was basically saying, all that money and
I inherited, I'm not going to live off of it.
I'm going to spend it all to go to China
and do what my husband was trying to do. Uh.
And you know, this certainly seems like a crazy move
for a woman who fully embraced creature comforts. I mean,

(08:43):
she was very open that she liked sort of living
her spoiled life in New York and like she wouldn't
walk up block if she could take a cab. And uh,
so it seemed very surprising too many people for her
to just go, no, I'm going to go do that
trip my husband was on. But really what motivated her
was likely just a very deep grief because, as we said,

(09:05):
it was an opposite attract scenario. And Ruth and Bill
at this point had been together for a decade and
they were very happily married and very close partners. They
were basically best friends. But before we get to Ruth
traveling off to China, uh, we're gonna take a quick
ad from our sponsor. If that's cool with Tracy, let's
do it. Most of what we knew about Ruth's first

(09:34):
journey is through her letters to her best friend, Hazel Perkins,
who was nicknamed Perky, and so once Ruth arrived in Shanghai,
she really took a different approach to the mission than
was customary and certainly different than the way Bill had
handled things. Whereas normally Western explorers would go into a
new place like this on these adventure and discovery expeditions,

(09:55):
with a team of fellow Westerners, and they would lay
out their plan and follow it. Ruth got rid of
all of the men that he had already hired and
brought on, and she opted to seek out locals as
her guides and her employees, at least almost locals. She
ended up hiring Quentin Young, and he was a young
Chinese American college student as her god. She said of him,

(10:19):
when Quentin Young consented to take charge of my expedition,
the obstacles that he had surrounded me began to disappear.
In fact, the Chinese wall of it can't be done,
crumpled like the walls of Jericho. Yeah, this was not
the Young family's first time assisting Americans with panda expeditions.
Quentin's younger brother, Jack had actually led Teddy Roosevelt's sons

(10:41):
on a giant panda hunting expedition in nine and in
this case, the goal which was achieved was strictly to
hunt the animal. With Jack's assistants, the Roosevelt boys shot
and killed a giant panda and returned home with it
as a hunting trophy, giving them the dubious honor of
being the first Americans to kill a panda. Quentin knew

(11:01):
the areas of Tibet where their travels were going to
take them, and his guidance in this expedition really can't
be understated. He was fluent in Chinese as well as English,
and he was able to handle virtually every logistical need
of Mrs harkness ambitious plan. Yeah. I mean, this is
a woman who she uh you know, was used to
getting everything she wanted, and he kind of made that

(11:23):
happen for her again in China. Uh And Harkness and
Young left Shanghai on September twenty six and nineteen thirty six,
and they traveled up the Yancey River for several weeks
before reaching cheng Do, which is the capital of Sichuan Province.
And there they hired a complement of servants to carry loads,
and they also hired a cook before they started their

(11:44):
journey into the Tibetan highlands. What they wanted to do
was to capture a baby panda. Harkness carried a supply
of items that she thought would help her care for
a baby panda, so she had nursing bottles and dry milk.
Through her letters to Perkey, she stioned that no one
really knew how to care for a panda, but she
seemed enthusiastic and confident about her plan. And her idea

(12:07):
to acquire an infant was actually another departure from the
usual approach. Previous expeditions to capture a panda uh and
ones that were you know, being mounted around the same
time always intended to bring back an adult. But that
was really quite problematic for a number of reasons. Uh. First,
no matter how cute pandas are, uh, they are wild bears.

(12:27):
They do not want to be disturbed. They do not
want your hugs anymore than the komodo dragons do. Uh.
The equipment for the capture would also be extremely cumbersome,
so they would have to have porters to carry chains
like heavy chains and traps and cages for an adult animal.
And additionally, just transporting an adult would also mean that
you had to deal with an adult panda's appetite, which

(12:48):
would have included carrying a great deal of bamboo back
along with it just to sustain it through the journey.
Trying to get a cub instead solved most of these problems. Yeah,
smaller pack it, less fuss, It was not so much
bamboo portage, No, not at all. Uh So the team
traveled up to thirty miles a day on foot, and
sometimes the temperatures got incredibly high, north of a hundred

(13:11):
degrees fahrenheit, and you would think that, uh, someone who
had been living in privilege for so long would really
struggle with it. But surprisingly Ruth apparently did extremely well
on the journey. She was just driven and she you know,
hoofed it all those miles. And sometimes when she would
get tired, the porters would kind of make a hammock
style chair for her that she could rest in for
a little while and they would carry her for a bit,

(13:34):
but mostly she did it under her own steerage there um,
so she really you know, kind of stepped up to
the bar. And also during this journey, at some point
Harkness and her guide, Quentin Young, became romantically involved. This
group was eventually met by an elderly Tibetan man. He
was named Loud Saying, and he said that the word

(13:56):
had reached him that a Western woman was looking for
a panda. He said he knew where to find them,
and he offered his services. So he and his son
in law joined the group as they headed into the
bamboo forest. Yeah, when she I read an article and
one link to Injean notes, and it's kind of her
relaying her story. It's much briefer than any of the
other books to this journalist, and it really is very

(14:18):
sort of um like a Curasawa film, like this elderly
Tibetan man just kind of wanders out of the fog
one day and it's like, I will help you find
the pandas. And they have a picture in that article
of an elderly Tibetan man. So I presume it is
in fact accurate and non embellishment, but it seems so surreal.
I thought I thought you were going to say there
were seven different versions of what happened. No, not quite.

(14:43):
In November, they set up four different camps, and they
were guided to do so by information that pandas don't
make nests and instead have this more nomadic lifestyle. It
was only a few days before things started to get interesting.
They heard noises in the forest and then a gunshot.
The air was full of a really heavy mist, so
the visibility was almost non existent. Ruth had been extremely

(15:06):
clear with her team that she did not want anyone
to shoot the pandas so in the heavy miss they
really were not sure what was going on. Yeah, she
describes being very terrified in that moment. She didn't know
if they were in danger because they did you know.
This was the time when China was going through some
upheavals and they did, at one point, you know, encounter
UM soldiers on their journeys and other you know people,

(15:27):
So she didn't know if they were walking into something
dangerous or if someone had shot a panda from her group,
even though she had asked them not to. But Quentin
decided that he would explore the area and he uh
discovered in a hollowed out tree a tiny panda cub
and he thought that someone may have shot the mother
and that might have been the shot they heard, although

(15:49):
that was never established with certainty. Uh Still, he tucked
the cub into his shirt and he climbed back down
to the ground with it. The panda was later named
Sulin after one of Quentin's relatives, which was his sister
in law, who was quite an explorer in her own
right UM and would make a great podcast subject in
the future. She's on my list. Mrs Harkners cared for

(16:11):
the cub as the team made its way back to
chong Do and then to Shanghai, and she had no
experience in caring for babies, so she pretty much went
with her intuition and did the best that she could.
The porters that she and Quentin Young had hired two
turns carrying the baby panda in baskets and between feedings. Um.
And incidentally, while the panda was given a woman's name,

(16:35):
it turned out to be a boy. Yeah. Yeah, poor Ruth,
she you know, had never been a mother, She had
no experience caring for human babies. So even though she
was like, I'll just you know, try to do my
best with the cub as though it's a baby, and
she's like, wait, I don't know what to do with
babies either. Well, in panda cubs require some pretty specific care. Yeah,
and she was making it all up as she went along. Um.

(16:57):
When she arrived in Shanghai, she did take uh the
cub to a doctor to have it looked over and
make sure it was okay, and it apparently passed. So
getting Sulan out of China proved to be a kind
of a challenge. The panda cub was seized by customs
officials in Shanghai and the ship that she had booked
passage on left port, so Ruth wound up remaining in China,

(17:18):
choosing to stay in the customs shed with the panda overnight. Yeah,
she didn't want to leave Sulin. Uh. And the next day,
Harkness and the panda were finally released and they were
allowed to, you know, book another passage and head to
the US. But there was a little bit of paperwork
juggling because the cub actually ended up listing on the
customs document as a dog. So there are a few

(17:41):
theories about whether or not she used her wealth to
kind of finagle that, or if she just charmed someone,
or if there was some sort of lucky accident to
the whole thing, but Sulan was listed as a dog. Uh.
They traveled back to the US on a luxury ship,
so Sulian definitely got a taste of the high life. Uh.
They first landed in San Francisco, and then they went

(18:02):
on to Chicago from there, and then they finally went
back to Manhattan. And what's sort of interesting about this
is that throughout the journey, UH, Ruth kept Sulin with her.
She basically carried this panda in her arms everywhere she went.
It rode in cabs with her, it went to restaurants
with her, and went to parties with her, and then
when she got to New York, it actually lived with

(18:22):
her in her New York apartment. So on the one hand,
this sounds like the case of a rich lady doing
something eccentric, uh with having an animal as an accessory,
but really her inclination to keep the baby panda close
to her was probably pretty beneficial to it. She wanted
to keep it safe. Although there was significant press and

(18:43):
exposure surrounding her being the panda Lady. Ruth and Sulin
were front page news for weeks and wound up on
numerous radio programs. Yeah, the there have been some that
have theorized that her keeping it with her all the
time up against her body kind of gave it the
necessary body heat, because you know, babies are very sissif
to bull even for babies to losing their body heat

(19:03):
very quickly when they're young, so it probably did help
it that she was clinging with it well. And baby
pandas also, their digestive systems are not actually built to
digest anything, and so the mother has to move the
baby around all the time, So if she was carrying
the baby panda around, that probably did help. Yeah, she's
sort of accidentally, whether it was intuition or a lucky accident,
she ended up doing the right thing to some degree. However,

(19:26):
Eventually Sulin was handed over to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. UH.
They bought it from Ruth for a little less than
nine thousand dollars, and while it was on exhibit at Brookfield,
the panda drew record breaking crowds. In a single day,
more than fifty three thousand people showed up to see
this panda cub because it was a completely exotic creature.

(19:47):
And before we go on uh to talk about Ruth
and Sulin and some additional adventures, let's have a quick
ad from our sponsor. Seven Harkness returned to China to
collect another panda, and this time she was not as

(20:08):
well repaired. She seemed to be sort of counting on
a simple repeat of what had happened the last time,
but things did not work out that way new Uh.
For one thing, the real sort of dramatic problem was
that she got back to China and discovered that Quentin
Young had gotten married in the time that she was
away and he was not going to be available to
join her, and I presumed certainly not to continue their

(20:31):
romantic relationship. Uh, you never know, you never know. I'm
not judging. I'm just saying it didn't seem to work out.
Despite the fact that much of her success on her
first expedition really was due to the guidework of Young,
she you know, ever a bit obstinate. I mean, this
is the woman whose friends were telling her you're crazy,
You're crazy when she first decided on all of this,

(20:52):
and she kind of dug in her heels as a consequence,
Like I think she's one of those people that really
is motivated to do things in spite of what other
people are telling her. So even though it seems like
maybe not the smartest thing to go without Quentin Young,
she was like, I'm going to do it anyway, and
she did. And she did manage to capture another panda
cub on her own. This one was named May May,

(21:13):
and this new cub joined Sulin on exhibit at the
Brickfield Zoo, but Suland developed pneumonia and died shortly after
the arrival of the second cub. Yeah, there are actually
some interesting differences of accounts of what happened to sulin Um.
I read one and I couldn't corroborate it anywhere, but
I just want to mention it off hand in case
any of our listeners go looking and find it and say,

(21:35):
this isn't what they said. One account said that he
had actually choked on a piece of food, like on
a piece of bamboo that had lodged in his throat,
and that he didn't die from the choking, but then
he ended up getting a secondary infection from where it
had either punctured something or um whatever. And one newspaper
wrote it up as him having died of curiosity, which
is sort of horrible and I don't know, it just

(21:57):
rubbed me the wrong way. Uh, But most accounts that
he died of pneumonia. Uh. There was a third trip
that Harkness went on in and this really proved to
be a significant shift in her life and a big
turning point. She was successful and once again getting a cub,
but before she could return to the States with it,

(22:19):
she really experienced a pretty significant change of heart about
the whole business. So in the two years since she
captured su Lan all kinds of hunters from all over
the world had gone on pandaquests of their own, and
they weren't generally approaching them with the same good intentions
that had guided Harkness. So on top of that, two
cubs she had transported previously had died in transit, and

(22:41):
all this kind of weighed on her, and she was
contemplating the area where she had captured this third cub,
which is near where she had had gotten both Sulian
and Maymay, and Ruth was very troubled when she realized
that there was a significant, visible to her drop in
the number of pandas in this bamboo forest and her intent,

(23:01):
she said when she relayed, sort of what was going
through her mind at this time was that she had,
you know, envisioned bringing mating pairs back to the Western
world and kind of you know, fostering a panda population
in the US. But things were not going as planned.
Uh So, instead of bringing another panda to the US
and risking its life in the process, she made a

(23:22):
really unusual choice and she trekked back up the mountain
and returned the baby panda to the wild. So this
was a really detrimental move for Harkness. She had been
a moneyed party girl, and at this point she had
really spent a lot of her fortune on these expeditions,
So returning the panda was a huge blow to her finances. Yeah,

(23:43):
she wasn't going to get the publicity and the the
you know, cost of the panda back. Uh, people were
probably not going to want to interview her a whole
bunch about. Oh, I felt bad and put it back. Uh.
May May was in captivity for about five years, but
she died very young. In then Ruth, leaving behind her

(24:08):
trips to China, developed a drinking problem. Yeah, while she
had been traveling initially in China, Harkness had really come
to embrace some of the people of the area and
the concepts of Eastern spirituality. And when she would write
letters to Perky and other friends, she really talked about
how she was, you know, kind of getting into um,
this Eastern spirituality and learning to let go of attachments

(24:30):
to possessions and people, and how it, you know, had
given her this sense of peace and really, you know,
brought a change in her and an ability to sort
of just be in the world. But the sentiment seems
like it may have been kind of one of those
early exposure enthusiasm situations because it did not stay with her. Um.
You know, when she was back in the States, she

(24:51):
never seemed to find, you know, that piece that she
had felt in China, and once she was permanently back
in New York, she just kind of spiraled downward. On
July seven, she was found dead in a hotel bathtub,
and her death was ruled the result of acute alcoholic gastro.
Ento writis, Yeah, it's a very set end for her. Uh. However,

(25:13):
she has an interesting legacy. Um. There is a book,
like it's the book that most people kind of point at, uh,
written about Harkness, which is called The Lady in the Panda,
and it's very very fascinating, But in reading it, I
kind of feel like the author Vicky Croak, and she
does a really good job with the book, but it
feels a little bit romanticized to me. She kind of

(25:35):
paints Harknesses as a hero character and describes her as
a combination of Myrna Loy and Jane Goodall, which sounds
really good, but it also sounds pretty idealized. But at
the same time, she really was an extraordinary woman. So
I want to be clear that I don't know how
much of my own sort of perception and filters or
affecting my read of it. Uh. Well, and she did

(25:55):
alter the way the public perceived animals. She brought Sulan
home to New York in her arms instead of at
least or cage. Do you know, she was treating it
like a baby instead of like a thing that should
be put in a box. She asserted that animals had
individuality and personality just like humans do, but because she
was not a trained biologist, her message kind of anthropomorphized pandas,

(26:19):
which is a little problematic. Yeah, this is an issue
which you know, continues to be discussed and debated. But
once people perceive an animal as human, like you know,
the study of them becomes subjective. In the case of
such a high profile animal, it can be a little
bit detrimental in terms of the public perception and the
consequential misconceptions that grow out of it. So pandas are

(26:42):
I mean, I think you would be hard pressed to
find someone who does not acknowledge that pandas are super cute,
So it's easy for people to start thinking them as
cute pets and like these sweet things rather than wild animals.
But because you said earlier they are wild bears, they
don't want to be your friend, even though they look
really chill and adorable when they're rolling around in their
habitats and zeus, they're not They're not humans and they're

(27:06):
not pets. They're they're their own thing. Well, and there's
a lot of ongoing debate about anthropomorphism, so these are
kind of the broad strokes. Anthropomorphism can be detrimental to
the study of animal cognition, and it can negatively impact
our body of knowledge about animals. When it comes to
an endangered animal, and you know, giant pandas are the

(27:26):
poster animals for endangerment, it has the potential to get
in the way of conservation efforts. Yeah. I mean most biologists,
certainly that I have known, they try to stay really
objective about it, but it's a fight. I mean, I've
certainly talked to people that have said, like, no, I
have to constantly remind myself, like, I'm working with an animal.
This is not a human. I can't assume it's intent

(27:47):
in its behaviors. And so, you know, if you're always
struggling with something like that, it's not like you know,
being able to put a piece of a drop of
blood on a slide and look at it. You're interpreting
things that animals are doing, and so it's really hard
to stay on guard. So that's why anthropomorphism can be
really tricky. Well, and it's like nature centers that are
really focused on conservation and preservation, a lot of times

(28:09):
the animals that are there don't have names. Um. And
you know, somebody say, what is this fox's name? And
it's well, it doesn't have a name. It's a wild animal.
It's not someone's pet. So in a two thousand four census,
it was estimated that there were only around six hundred
giant pandas in the wild and about three hundred zoos.
A lot of biologists actually think these numbers are a

(28:31):
lot lower, especially in captivity. Female pandas really can have
trouble conceiving, and their fertility windows are really narrow, sometimes
as low as twelve to twenty four hours in a year. Yeah,
they once each spring they become fertile. Um. Tracy actually
wrote an article for the site about it that I'm
in a reference in just a minute. Uh. And because

(28:52):
of their reclusive natures, though almost everything we know about
these endangered bears is from the study of captive animals.
So again it's one of those things where they're pros
and cons to the situation. Uh. You know, sometimes it's
hard to see an animal in a captive situation, even
if it's in the best possible, you know, very perfectly

(29:12):
designed environment. But at the same time, if we didn't
have them in captivity, we would not know anything about
them and would not be as informed to you know,
kind of pursue conservation efforts. So there are two sides
to that coin. And today giant pandas living in US
facilities actually still belong to China. It's not a situation
like Ruth Hardness where she could go get one and

(29:33):
then sell it here. They are all owned by China. Uh.
If you see a panda in a US zoo, it
is leased by the Chinese government, and those leasing fees
actually go back into a fund that is used to
further the study and conservation of giant pandas in their
native home. UH. The Giant Panda Reserve at Woolong has
been pretty successful at kind of figuring out how to

(29:56):
breed pandas. It's still tricky. There's still a lot of
work to be done, but they are getting to a
point where they feel like they will soon be able
to reintroduce panda's born in captivity into the wild and
start bolstering their wild numbers. Having a having a panda
in a zoo as an enormous financial commitment. It's really
huge any animal in a zoo. I think that's one

(30:17):
of those things people don't realize when they say, why
are tickets to this place? Is so expensive and it's like, okay,
keeping a whale alive for a year across like a
million dollars. Well, and on top of all, you know,
the food in the habitat and all that stuff. Like
the amount of money that the zoo gives to China
for panda conservation research is enormous um. Sue Lynn is
still viewable in taxid army form along with the Tavo lions.

(30:40):
He's on display in the Field Museum's taxid Army Exhibit. Yeah.
I feel like we should get a kickback from the Field.
We send people there all the time. Somebody tweeted at
us that they had gone to the American Museum of
Natural History to see the lines and I was like,
oh no, that's wrong. Museum there in the field. Oh man,
I love the field. I gotta get back here soon. Uh.
And while the Ruth the work of Ruth harkne Us
draws varying opinions, as we've said, there are two sides

(31:02):
to the whole kind of capturing of an animal. Coin
in this situation, at a time when shooting exotic beasts
for sport was happening, she really did shift the public
thinking on pandas into one of adoration. She's sometimes credited,
you'll see, like in quick bios of hers, she's the
woman that started the panda craze, which is kind of
an interesting phrase anyway. But you know, this this shift

(31:26):
in mindset where people suddenly saw it as a sweet thing,
Let's find the interesting animal and protect it, instead of
let's find the interesting animal and shooting it until it
is dead. Yeah, So she's she's had a significant impact
on how we view not just pandas, but many other animals.
I think it it kind of shifted the way biologists
and zoologists were thinking about them at the time. You know,

(31:49):
at some point those people recognize that, like you can
know everything about zoology that you know, but you're gonna
need to get people that are not educated in biology
and science on board with you if you're gonna get
the funding to keep these efforts going, right, That's part
of it. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.

(32:13):
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(32:35):
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